A war without winners

Who could honestly have predicted, back in 1994 or even as late as 2005, that the years of New Labour ascendancy would end in this way, with an irreconcilable eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation between the two men whose raw talent and unprecedented closeness built the most electorally successful government in the history of the British left? New Labour has had many moments of hubris in the last dozen years - but not until now has it experienced such a moment of nemesis. That moment was reached around four o'clock yesterday afternoon, when the irresistible force of Gordon Brown's desire to become party leader as soon as possible met the immovable object of Tony Blair's determination to depart with dignity in the middle of next year. The two men met for almost two hours in 10 Downing Street to see if some form of words and deeds could be constructed to enable both men to get most of what they want. Their efforts failed. The differences were unbridgeable.

Whether the failure owes more to one man's ego or the other man's vanity is not really the issue. Downing Street accused Mr Brown of trying to blackmail the prime minister. The chancellor's camp charged Mr Blair with putting his own interests above those of the party. If Mr Blair truly believed his chancellor was guilty of blackmail (and was willing to sanction a public briefing to this effect) he should have surely sacked him. That he didn't - or couldn't - speaks volumes about the weakness of his position. An alternative logic is thus irresistible: that the prime minister's grasp on power is so enfeebled that he cannot reasonably cling to office for much longer.

At the end of a day of some considerable drama, the indisputable reality was that the difference between the two men's positions was bridgeable. It still is. Mr Blair has dramatically scaled down his previous plan to govern for a full third term to an ambition to be allowed to depart with dignity in a few months. Mr Brown knows that he will still be odds-on favourite and the natural successor. That two such senior figures could fail to resolve such a relatively small dispute is a cause of mutual censure. Labour supporters who yesterday had to swallow the vainglorious plans dreamed up by Downing Street for a Blair farewell tour that will now never take place will today learn with equal dismay that an attempt by the Brownite Alistair Darling and the Blairite Lord Falconer to act as honest brokers between their two patrons was vetoed by an implacable Mr Brown, who may have his own reasons for not taking his colleague's private assurances on trust. Labour's necessary and overdue transition to the post-Blair era looks likely to be far more destructive and bitter than Labour members and the millions who have voted for Labour since 1997 - and who continue to have faith in its values and achievements - had a right to demand.

Quite where all this will now go, at what speed and with what exact cost is hard to predict. A lot may hinge on the statement Tony Blair is due to make later today. But, unless Blair and Brown are reconciled, there is little reason for Labour to be optimistic about how things will play out.

With a sudden shower of government resignations following on from all the backbench plotting, Labour is a party polarising from top to bottom over the leadership question, and calls for a "stable and orderly transition" now seem to belong to a lost age of innocence. Nevertheless, it remains in Labour's interest for there to be as smooth a transfer as is possible in the unforgiving circumstances: civil war could destroy this government, just as surely as it has destroyed others in the past. If ever there was a moment for Labour MPs, members and supporters to demand a return to sanity and respect within the upper reaches of their party, this is it.